Barbara Waxman on Middlescence & Life After 50

Barbara Waxman

Author, The Middlescence Manifesto: Igniting the Passion of Midlife, Gerontologist, Leadership Coach, Speaker

What are you old enough to enjoy?

I'm old enough to enjoy the things that I enjoyed as a child and lost sight of for a while. So, I can be mesmerized by seeing a rain droplet on a leaf with the sun hitting it a certain way. As a child it's miraculous, and then you get busy, and you're growing up, and you're too important, or what have you. And now at this age and stage, I am full of gratitude for things big and small.

What’s the best gift you’ve given or received?
In 2015, my husband and I gave one another the gift of “re-potting” in Italy for an entire year. So, I guess you could say that the best gift is one I both gave and received. It was years of planning, but when our youngest son was in college, we thought we should figure out what we wanted to do in our post-raising children chapter. I call it repotting because it’s pulling up roots and planting in new soil for growth. In this case, the new soil was in Italy and the nutrients and water were from their amazing food and wine! Our intention was to gain perspective on lives, our culture, our choices." It was the gift of doing something daring. The big takeaways were living la dolce vita and carpe diem, to use two key phrases. The American way of more, bigger, faster really doesn't resonate in Italy. And having lifted ourselves out of our culture to gain perspective, we know we can be committed to our work, but also life, love and joy.

What’s the weirdest thing in your bag?

I mean, to me, it's not weird, but I guess for other people it would be. I always travel with tea. I drink Harney's Eight at the Fort. I even use my own tea sachets to brew the tea in. It's a little ritual. It can take two minutes, but I can center myself, taste the tea and get that quick reboot we all need from time to time.

Growing up, again.

When I was growing up, my dad, a physician, would take me with him to volunteer at the Menorah Home and Hospital in Brooklyn, New York. I was maybe seven years old, and I think he figured it was a nursing home, so a safe place. He would see patients while I roamed the halls. I remember so clearly the fluorescent lighting, the linoleum floors, the antiseptic smells. I would peek into people's rooms, and they'd say something along the lines of, "What's a nice girl like you doing in a place like this?" No one told me to be scared or not to want to go—things most people would feel--so I would look forward to those visits. I left feeling happy and more importantly, knowing I had made someone else happy. In retrospect, I realized this, and when I was pre-med in college and struggling with it (calculus and organic chemistry were not my friends) my father said, “There's this new field of gerontology. You love working with older people. Why don't you look into that?"

I'm not a geriatrician—that's an MD—I'm a gerontologist, meaning I specialize in all aspects of adult development because adults do continue to develop. Initially, I thought I’d teach, but before graduate school, I started working in a management consulting firm that had nothing to do with aging. I learned business skills and tactics, and realized I had a real thirst for entrepreneurship, so I combined my master’s degree in Gerontology with another one in Health Care Administration. In my early 40s, my clients started saying, "Do you coach? I'm looking for one." So, I went back to school, became credentialed, and started Odyssey Group Coaching in 2005. 

We took our time to repot in Italy at about the 15-year mark of my coaching career. Taking that time enabled me to reflect on all I had learned professionally. I recognized that people now live long enough to experience a kind of adolescence for a second time. In 1900 life expectancy in the United States was about 47. Today we are looking towards a century-long life. We added about 30 active years to life that mostly show up in the messy middle. I realized it wasn’t all that different from adolescence which was only named in the early 1900s by psychologist Stanley Hall. Hall identified social and cultural reasons to classify this age group, so they would be understood as struggling with figuring out, “What do I do in adulthood?”

Now, the moment I say “adolescence,” you get a quick intellectual and emotional response. You understand the powerful potential and challenges of that life stage. We experience that again in the messy middle; I call this second adolescence “Middlescence”. This time around we have the wisdom to go along with it. We can figure out not just what do we want in our next chapter (because we have multiple chapters), but can also reflect on the wisdom we have to guide our next best steps. Middlescence is not a crisis; it's a potential-filled time.

There is an oft-discussed U-curve of happiness that shows we get happier from about 50 on. When we're in our 20s we feel like, "I have time to make all kinds of mistakes." In our 30s and 40s, we’re so busy trying to prove ourselves in the world. We're trying to work, and we have families, so it's a fulfilling time but self-reported ratings of happiness actually begin to decrease then.  Around our late 40’s, something shifts.  There is a reckoning; not a crisis. If we, as a culture, understood that we are supposed to struggle and question during this stage, much like we allow for in adolescence, then the free-floating anxiety and so-called crisis would be avoided and people could get on with figuring out their next best steps.  

So, what is this free-floating anxiety so many describe?

The US is suffering from what I call ‘Cultura Lagosis”, which means a cultural lag. Our norms lag dangerously behind the way we actually live our lives. The truth is: A quarter of our working population is over 55, but everyone thinks people over 55 can't find a job. Most entrepreneurs are Middlescents. Midlife is a powerful time of life, but many have lost sight of that. Instead, there’s this ageist sense that this is the beginning of the end; that midlife is a downhill slope to decline.

And to make matters worse, our collective obsession with purpose doesn’t help. There’s a pressure to always be productive and on purpose. But life isn't like that. I like to think of purpose in two primary ways. There is your big-P purpose, what may feel like your life calling. Sometimes it's a gift, a child being weirdly excited about aging and making it their life’s work. Sometimes it shows up when there's an emergency and you need to step up to care for someone else. Sometimes Big P purpose becomes clear when there is an issue that becomes ‘your’ issue.  When that happens, think about your B-HAG (stay with me)—your big, hairy, audacious goal. Then break it down into manageable steps. 

The challenge is that most of us, much of the time, live with little-p purpose without big-P purpose guiding us. Little-p purpose is what brings you joy, it’s those small things you might do that add up to big things.  I lost my mom four years ago; I try to regularly pick up the phone and call one of her friends. What are similar, small things you can do to make the world a better place just because you’re in it? Your little-p purpose is what gets you on the path to big-P purpose.

The work I do pulls together the wisdom we all have within us to live out little-p purpose on the path to big-P purpose. I coach Middlescent leaders who want to navigate today’s complex challenges and demands while expanding their capacity, influence and impact, and the many benefits of increased longevity and vitality. In fact, I have everyone begin with work around mindset, energy, and work-life integration (because wouldn’t you know, work-life balance is a myth), the pillars of resilience. From my ten years plus studying resilience, I’ve observed how important it is to Middlescents. I invite all Verse readers to take the Five to Thrive Quiz©. It gives you an energy baseline, measuring The Five Essential Elements, the “energy building blocks” that ancient traditions and modern research agree bolster your resilience.

(For more from Barbara, visit www.barbarawaxman.com and check out Barbara’s workshop in February at Verse-approved Modern Elder Academy)